But it will presumably come as something of a shock to the Office of Health Economics, which has spent the last year deriding these ops as a waste of time and money.

Its analysis had claimed that half of hip and knee replacements were not worth doing, because patients either weren't suffering significantly impaired quality of life beforehand, or didn't benefit afterwards.

There was just one problem with this analysis… it was nonsense.

A new study of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) satisfyingly debunks the OHE myth, by finding that more than 90% of patients did in fact derive benefits from their operations.